Anthony Paul

“You, who only know love when in love, do not ask what it is, nor do you look for it. But when a woman once asked you if you were in love with love itself, you were evasive and escaped by answering: I love you. She persisted: Do you not love love? You said: I love you, because of you. She left you, because you could not be trusted with her absence. Love is not an idea. It is an emotion that can cool down or heat up. It comes and goes. It is an embodied feeling and has five, or more, senses. Sometimes it appears as an angel with delicate wings that can uproot us from the earth. Sometimes it charges at us like a bull, hurls us to the ground, and walks away. At other times it is a storm we only recognize in its devastating aftermath. Sometimes it falls upon us like the night dew when a magical hand milks a wandering cloud.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“Perhaps death is a metaphor to remind us of a secret of life we failed to notice.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“When the image is identical to reality, the imagination is compelled to be neutral. Therefore let the image of the object lie to the object so we can see what lies beyond the object, and in the light of that vision see what saves us from nothingness.”
― Mahmoud Darwish, In the Presence of Absence

“In this respect, to convert is to locate oneself in a particular temporality and duration. This duration is that of the inexhaustible future constituted by the infinite, the time of eternity, the time that inaugurates divine existence and its extension in the redemption of the body; thus its final point of completion—if there is one—is the parousia.”
― Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony